The Waterford Organic Gaia 1.1 Irish Single Malt Whiskey

Tasting notes:
The nose of the Waterford Organic Gaia, release 1.1, opens like a full-tang jackknife, by which I mean, it’s like a knife whose blade is made of Tang™. At first, it’s acidic and sharp—and Tang-y—but with a bit of time in the glass, it opens to a grassy meadow, whose individual blades have been painted with butterscotch by a Christo-wannabe artist. (So derivative!) A faint note of wet paint wafted by, tokening the relative youth of the Organic Gaia, 1.1. There’s also a flitting herb-y note, like a big-winged luna moth that’s been spending quality time with rosemary bushes and salvia officinalis, the sage subshrub.

The mouth hews to the nose; very attractive in a whisky (less attractive in John). We got a crazy-quilt acidic crème brûlée, redolent with more butterscotch and gobs of passionfruit. There is a thread of youngness woven into the crazy-quilt crème brûlée; it’s a green thread, feeling appropriate for an organic Irish whisky! More berries clustering on the roof of the mouth: blueberries, conkerberries, huckleberries, and mungoberries.
[Stephen: Bill! You’ve never had a conkerberry and there is no such thing as a mungoberry!]
That’s true…but there are Mungo Jerry’s! Take that! And John, ever the pseudo-contrarian, said he got “chuckberries” on the mouth going into the finish, wailing away on electric guitar.

The finish is univocal, meaning, I suppose, that the nose, the mouth, and the finish form a choir of Gregorian monks, intoning a sacred chant, all on the same note, but with different timbres at different octaves. All of us picked up a creamy, lightly white-ly peppery milky scrim curtain enrobing the finish. 

   

Rating:
On the scale of wonderfully terrible puns about movies–

The Waterford Organic Gaia, release 1.1, is Like Waterford Chocolate, based on the Laura Esquivel novel Like Water for Chocolate. It’s a great pun (thanks, Kirk Anderson!) for a solid chocolate. It’s well-tempered, it’s creamy, it’s got layers to it, some nougat, perhaps, and a lot of room to grow up.

   

   

                                                                                      —Bill

   

   

–Our thanks to Raj Sabharwal and Glass Revolution Imports for the sample!